Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about AEO Track and Answer Engine Optimization. Can't find your answer? Contact us.
AI Visibility & Citations
How do I get more citations from ChatGPT and Perplexity?
- Earn third-party sources. AI engines answer by synthesising several pages at once — in our own measurements an engine that cited a brand's site consulted 7.7 other sources alongside it, so the brand's own page was about 11% of the evidence. Editing your own site alone rarely moves a citation rate. What moves it is appearing in the roundups, comparison posts, community threads and review pages the engines already read for your category. Find those with a source gap analysis: list the domains that get cited when a competitor is recommended and have never cited you, then work down that list.
How do I know if AI assistants trust my content?
- Look at whether engines cite you as a source, not just whether they mention you. A mention can come from training data; a citation means the engine retrieved your page and treated it as checkable. The strongest trust signals are third-party corroboration (other sites saying the same thing about you), specific verifiable facts rather than claims, visible author and organization identity, structured data that matches the visible page, and content that is kept current. A page that is retrieved often but never cited usually lacks a concrete, quotable fact.
How can I monitor when AI search cites my website?
- Citation tracking records every time an AI engine names your URL as a source, which engine did it, and for which question. It is a higher bar than a mention — the engine has to treat your page as a reference, not just recall your brand — so most sites see zero at first. AEO Track logs each citation with the prompt that produced it, so you can see which pages earn references and which questions never surface you at all.
Crawlers & Measurement
Why can't a JavaScript tracking snippet count AI crawlers?
- Because AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the rest request your HTML and leave, so a snippet that fires on page load never executes for them. A JavaScript-only bot counter therefore reports a small and unrepresentative fraction of real crawler traffic, and gives no signal that it is a fraction — the visits it misses look exactly like visits that never happened. Server logs have no such blind spot: every request appears whether or not anything ran client-side.
How do I track AI crawlers accurately?
- Read your CDN or edge access logs rather than relying on a browser snippet. AEO Track ingests logs pushed from a Vercel Log Drain or a Cloudflare Logpush job, identifies known AI crawler user-agents, and records the path and the status code each one received. The status code matters: a 403 to GPTBot or a 404 to a crawler is a finding on its own, and it is structurally invisible to a JavaScript beacon, which by definition only runs on pages that rendered successfully.
What is the difference between branded and non-branded AI visibility?
- A branded question already contains your name, so an engine mentioning you proves little about whether it would recommend you unprompted. A non-branded question is one a buyer asks before they know any brand names — and that is the only kind that measures organic discovery. The distinction matters most for brands named after their category, where the ordinary phrasing of the category contains the brand once spacing is ignored, and an engine retrieves you for spelling reasons rather than reputation. AEO Track classifies every tracked question and reports a separate organic-discovery score built only from the neutral ones.
How do enterprises monitor AEO across multiple AI platforms and brands?
- By tracking each brand as its own workspace with its own question set, competitors and schedule, then comparing them on the same metrics. The things that matter at multi-brand scale are per-engine breakdowns (engines disagree sharply — one may name you consistently while another never does), share of voice against a named competitor set, scheduled checks so the data is a trend rather than a snapshot, and role-based access so each team sees its own brands. AEO Track supports multiple websites from Pro upward and unlimited on Enterprise.
How do I benchmark my AI visibility against competitors?
- Compare share of voice on the same questions, not on separate ones. Share of voice is your mentions as a proportion of all tracked brands' mentions across the same set of AI answers, so it moves when your position genuinely changes rather than when you add more questions. Useful alongside it: average position within the answer (being named first is not the same as being named), and a per-engine breakdown, because a competitor can dominate one engine and be absent from another.
AEO Basics
What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of optimizing your website content so that AI-powered search engines — like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Grok — can find, understand, and cite your content in their generated answers. Unlike traditional SEO which focuses on ranking in link-based results, AEO ensures your brand appears when users ask AI assistants questions about your industry.
How does aeotrack.io track AI visibility?
- AEO Track (aeotrack.io) queries ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Grok with keywords relevant to your business, then reports whether your brand, content, or URLs appear in the responses. You get a visibility score, citation counts per engine, and actionable recommendations to improve your presence in AI answers.
How is this different from traditional SEO tools?
- Traditional SEO tools focus on Google's link-based results — rankings, backlinks, keywords. AEO Track focuses on AI-generated answers (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok), which capture a growing share of search. We measure whether AI engines cite your content and help you optimize for machine comprehension and citation — not just classic SEO.
What is the best AEO tracker in 2026?
- AEO Track (aeotrack.io) is the leading AEO tracker in 2026. It monitors your brand visibility across all five major AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok — with search-grounded checks, citation tracking, scheduled monitoring, competitor intelligence, and a free AEO checker. Unlike other AEO trackers, it provides actionable fixes alongside analytics.
Is there a free AEO checker I can use without signing up?
- Yes. AEO Track offers a completely free AEO checker at aeotrack.io/audit. Paste any URL to get an instant AEO score, content analysis, schema check, and prioritized fixes — all without creating an account. It's the fastest free AEO checking tool available, delivering results in under 60 seconds.
What does AEO tracking software do?
- AEO tracking software monitors whether AI answer engines mention your brand, cite your URLs, or recommend your competitors. AEO Track's tracking software queries ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Grok with your keywords, calculates visibility scores and citation counts, and provides content optimization recommendations to increase your presence in AI-generated answers.
How does an AEO analyzer work?
- An AEO analyzer crawls your webpage and evaluates how well it is optimized for AI answer engines. AEO Track's analyzer checks content structure, FAQ coverage, schema markup (JSON-LD), readability, keyword targeting, and answer-readiness. It then produces an AEO score from 0-100 with specific recommendations ranked by impact, so you know exactly what to fix first.
Getting Started
What is AEO Track?
- AEO Track (aeotrack.io) is an Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) platform that tracks your brand's visibility in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok. You add your website and the questions your customers actually ask, and we report how often you're mentioned or cited — with a confidence range — along with the specific fixes that move it.
Is there a free plan?
- There's a 14-day free trial with every feature unlocked and no credit card required: 1 website, 20 tracked questions, 10 GEO topics, scheduled weekly checks and 15 on-demand re-checks a month. There's no permanent free tier — real checks mean real queries against five paid AI APIs, several times each. When the trial ends your account becomes read-only: nothing is deleted, and picking a plan resumes everything. The free AEO Audit at aeotrack.io/audit gives instant results for any URL — no account needed.
How do I get started?
- Sign up at aeotrack.io, add your website URL and a few target keywords, and we'll run your first visibility check automatically. Results appear in your dashboard within minutes. You can also run a free one-off audit at aeotrack.io/audit without creating an account.
Do I need technical skills to use AEO Track?
- No. AEO Track is built for marketers, content creators, and business owners. Setup needs only your website address. The dashboard uses plain-language explanations and prioritized action steps. The FAQ Schema Generator produces copy-paste-ready JSON-LD markup.
AI Visibility Tracking
Which AI engines does AEO Track monitor?
- We track five: OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity AI and xAI's Grok. Every engine runs with its live web search enabled, so results reflect what a real person asking that question would see today — not what the model memorized during training. We report mentions and citations per engine so you can see where to focus.
How often are visibility checks run?
- Every plan runs scheduled weekly checks of everything you track automatically, so your visibility is tracked without you clicking anything. On top of that, Starter includes 15 on-demand re-checks a month, Pro 60, Business 100 and Enterprise 300. Pro also monitors your 3 most important questions daily, Business 5, Enterprise 10 (pausing after 14 days without a sign-in, resuming on your next visit), and the trial includes daily monitoring of 3 questions on days you sign in. One re-check queries every configured engine, and each question has a 24-hour cooldown so you aren't paying for noise.
What is an AEO visibility score?
- Your AEO visibility score (0–100) measures more than whether you were mentioned. A mention earns a baseline, then adds points for how high you rank in the answer, whether the engine cites your site as a source, and how positively it describes you. Scores are averaged across engines and shown with a confidence range (for example 62 ±8), so you can tell a real improvement from normal run-to-run variation.
What is citation tracking?
- Citation tracking monitors when AI engines explicitly link to or reference your URLs as sources in their answers. It shows which pages are most cited, on which engines, and for which queries — so you know exactly which content to double down on.
AEO Score & Audit
What is the free AEO Audit?
- The free AEO Audit at aeotrack.io/audit analyzes any public URL and produces an AEO score from 0–100, a breakdown of content structure, schema markup status, readability, and answer-readiness — plus a prioritized list of fixes, in under 60 seconds.
How is the AEO score calculated?
- There are two scores, and they measure different things. The AEO visibility score (0–100, shown on your dashboard) is built from what the AI engines actually answered: whether you were named, where in the answer, whether your site was cited, and how positively — averaged across engines with a confidence range. The free audit score is different: it grades your own page for AI readiness — content structure, schema markup, readability and answer-readiness — and moves the moment you publish a fix. Improving the audit score helps engines read you; only the visibility score tells you whether they recommend you.
How do I improve my AEO score?
- The most impactful improvements are: (1) add FAQ sections with direct Q&A answers, (2) implement FAQ Page schema markup using JSON-LD, (3) use clear H2/H3 headings that match question phrasing, (4) include specific data and statistics AI engines can quote, and (5) ensure your content is regularly updated. AEO Track's action plan gives you specific steps ranked by impact.
Content & Optimization Tools
What is the FAQ Generator?
- The FAQ Generator takes any URL and produces 10 AEO-optimized questions and answers based on your page content. It generates ready-to-deploy JSON-LD FAQ Page schema markup that you can add to your site's <head> to help AI engines find and cite your answers.
What is the Content Optimizer?
- The Content Optimizer analyzes your page and rewrites or suggests improvements to make it more answer-engine friendly — better structured, more concise, with clearer answers. It's included on every plan — Starter includes 100 optimizer and FAQ generations a month, Pro and above are unlimited.
What is SERP Monitoring?
- SERP Monitoring tracks how your content appears in AI Overviews (Google), featured snippets, and answer boxes in traditional search results. It complements AI visibility tracking with data from web search. Available on Pro and higher plans.
What is Competitor Intelligence?
- Competitor Intelligence lets you compare your AI visibility score against competitor domains. See which competitors are cited more often by AI engines, on which queries, and what content they have that you don't — so you can close the gap. Included on every plan: Starter tracks up to 5 competitors, Pro 10, Business 25 and Enterprise has no limit.
Billing & Plans
How does billing work?
- Paid plans are billed monthly or annually — annual billing is 20% less. You can cancel anytime from your Billing page; your plan remains active until the end of the billing period you have already paid for, and there are no partial or prorated refunds. All payments are processed securely by Stripe.
Can I upgrade or downgrade my plan?
- Yes. Upgrades apply immediately from your Billing page — the new features are available right away and you pay only the prorated difference for the rest of the current billing period. Downgrades take effect at the start of your next billing period: you keep your current plan until then, and nothing is refunded or credited.
Is there a refund policy?
- Refunds are handled on a case-by-case basis. Contact support@aeotrack.io if you believe you are entitled to a refund.
Do you offer annual pricing?
- Yes. Every plan has an annual option at 20% off — Starter works out at $23.20/mo, Pro at $63.20/mo and Business at $159.20/mo. Switch the toggle on the pricing page, or change it from your Billing page at any time.
Privacy & Security
How does AEO Track handle my data?
- We store your account information, website configurations, and analysis results securely in MySQL with encryption in transit (TLS/SSL). We do not sell your personal data. Website URLs you submit are processed via AI APIs (OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, Perplexity and xAI Grok) for analysis, consistent with their privacy policies.
Is my payment information secure?
- Yes. All payments are processed by Stripe, a PCI DSS Level 1 certified provider. We never store your credit card details on our servers.
How do I whitelist AEO Track’s crawler?
- Allow the User-Agent AEOTrackBot (currently AEOTrackBot/1.0) in your firewall, CDN or robots.txt — that covers every fetch AEO Track itself makes when it analyzes your pages. The AI engines are separate: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok read your site with their own crawlers (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Google-Extended and GoogleOther), and blocking those stops AI engines from reading and citing you at all. A ready-to-paste robots.txt allowing all of them is at aeotrack.io/downloads/robots-ai-bots.txt.
How can I delete my account?
- You can request account deletion by emailing privacy@aeotrack.io. We'll delete your personal data within 30 days. Anonymized, aggregated analytics may be retained for product improvement.
What is the difference between being cited and being mentioned in an AI answer?
- Cited means the engine retrieved one of your URLs while composing the answer. Mentioned means your brand name appears in the text a person actually reads. They are separate events and they fail for opposite reasons. Across 446 tracked answers for one domain we recorded 68 citations but only 38 mentions, and on one engine 22 answers cited the site without naming it once. AEOTrack reports the two numbers separately per prompt and per engine, because a single blended “visibility” figure hides the gap between them.
Why do AI engines cite my site but still recommend a competitor?
- Because your page is only part of the evidence. When an engine cited one tracked domain it consulted an average of 7.7 other sources alongside it, so that site was roughly an eighth of the material behind the answer — and if the other sources name a competitor, the engine takes the facts from you and the recommendation from them. This is a corroboration problem, not a crawling one: more schema markup or another rewrite will not change it. The fix is to earn factual mentions on the domains the engine already retrieves for your prompts.
Measuring AEO Across AI Assistants
How do I track AEO mentions in ChatGPT and Gemini?
- Ask each engine the questions your buyers actually ask, on a schedule, and record two separate things: whether your brand is named in the answer, and whether your URL is cited as a source. They are not the same signal — a mention can come from training data, while a citation means the engine retrieved your page and treated it as checkable. Doing this by hand fails for a specific reason: AI answers are non-deterministic, so a single check is an anecdote, not a rate. You need the same prompt run repeatedly before the number means anything. AEO Track runs your prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok, stores every answer, and reports mention rate and citation rate per question per engine.
How do I measure AEO performance in AI search results?
- With two rates, measured per question and per engine: how often the engine names your brand (mention rate) and how often it cites your site as a source (citation rate). Track both, because they move independently — it is common to sit near 30% mentions and under 5% citations, which means the engines know who you are but do not treat your pages as evidence. Report the numbers with a confidence interval rather than as a single figure, since answers vary between runs and a score from one check is mostly noise. A useful measurement also records which other domains were cited alongside you, because that list is the work: those are the sources the engine already trusts for your category.
How do enterprises handle AEO monitoring across AI platforms?
- The same measurement, with more structure. At scale it becomes one tracked question set per brand or product line, run on a schedule across every engine that matters, with results split by engine rather than averaged — engines disagree far more than most teams expect, and a blended score hides that. Add alerting that fires only when a score moves outside its noise band, competitor share-of-voice on the same questions, and citation-source tracking so you can see which third-party domains the engines read for your category. The parts that scale badly are all manual: a person pasting prompts into five chat windows cannot produce a rate, cannot cover several brands, and cannot separate a real drop from run-to-run variance.
What are the alternatives to manual AEO tracking methods?
- Manual tracking means opening ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok, pasting a prompt into each, and noting whether you were mentioned. It has three failure modes, not one: AI answers are non-deterministic, so a single run is an anecdote rather than a rate; personalisation and chat history skew what you see against what a stranger sees; and the effort grows with questions multiplied by engines multiplied by weeks, so it stops the first time you are busy. The alternatives fall into three groups. Scheduled automated checks run the same prompts repeatedly and report a rate with a confidence interval. Log-based crawler tracking tells you which AI crawlers actually fetched your pages, but not what any engine said about you. Brand-monitoring tools watch the open web rather than the engines, which is useful but does not answer whether an assistant recommends you. AEO Track is the first kind.
What is the best AEO tracking software for AI assistants?
- It depends on what you need to prove, and an honest answer names more than one tool. If the question is whether assistants recommend you and cite you, judge a tool on: which assistants it covers (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok), whether it reports mention rate and citation rate separately, whether it breaks results down per engine instead of blending them, whether it gives confidence intervals so you can tell a real change from variance, and whether it records the other sources cited alongside you. The category includes AEO Track, Profound, Peec AI, Otterly, Semrush's AI toolkit and BrightEdge; they differ mainly in engine coverage, whether citations are measured at all, and price. AEO Track's own difference is that it measures AEO and GEO separately and reports intervals rather than one number.
What are the best AEO platforms for AI content optimization?
- Measurement and optimization are different jobs, and most tools do one of them well. A platform aimed at AI content optimization should do three things: show you which questions you are invisible for, show you what the engines cited instead of you, and give you a change you can actually make — schema that matches your visible copy, an answer-first rewrite, an FAQ block that mirrors questions people really ask. Be sceptical of anything that promises to optimize for AI without showing the measurement underneath, because the only proof an optimization worked is the mention or citation rate moving afterwards. Tools in this space include AEO Track, Profound, Peec AI and Otterly; Semrush and BrightEdge come at it from traditional SEO.
Still have questions?
Our team is happy to help. Email us at support@aeotrack.io and we'll get back to you within one business day.